Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . We are very pleased to announce the results of the 7th Singapore Poetry Contest. In conjunction with our Gaudy Boy launch of Monique Truong’s delicious novel The Sweetest Fruits now out in Singapore and Malaysia , this year’s contest had the novel’s title for its theme. Open to everyone, the contest was judged by Singapore Literature Prize winner, Marylyn Tan. Winners receive a cash prize, publication, and a signed copy of The Sweetest Fruits if they live in Singapore and Malaysia. We received a total of 157 poems. The entries came from 14 countries around the world. Singapore leads with 71 entries, followed by Nigeria 16, the US 16, the Philippines 15, India 10, the UK 9, South Korea 4, the UAE 4, Canada 3, Malaysia 3, the Netherlands 2, Spain 1, Switzerland 1, Taiwan 1, and 1 with no address. Because of the high quality of the entries, our judge decided to award two Honorable Mentions for exempla...

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Another Singapore poet quoted in Steep Tea is Leong Liew Geok. My poem "Singapore Catechism" rings changes on an evocative phrase in her poem "Exiles Return." From her "laterite roots," I go from literal to lateral to littoral to literate to lottery to latterly to litany and back to laterite, in trying to answer the Singlish question "You go where?" Born in Penang, Malaysia, Leong moved to Singapore in 1981. Thereafter, she published two important collections of poems, Love Is Not Enough (1991) and Women without Men (2000). The gardening poems in her second book represent a signal achievement in Singapore poetry. Alternating between lyrics and dramatic monologues, they are a sustained engagement with the cultivation of both self and environment. Singapore Poetry is reprinting the informal sequence of poems as the first of its "Special Focus" series . An avid gardener, Leong shot photographs of her garden for the series.

After keeping indoors for two days to nurse a cold, I venture out to the park newly opened since the snowstorm. Walking on snow is like walking on a beach, with the difference that I have too much clothes on. sand so white it has given up the ghost of a sea * Started talking with Alvin Pang, Joshua Ip, Jennifer Champion and Jennifer Crawford about setting up a website with the poetry archive that Jen Cr. has collected. We decided that Alvin will take care of the website, Josh the general management and fundraising, Jen Ch. the media editing and I the text editing. Everyone is pitching in, because we really want a website devoted to Singapore poetry. We are now thinking about a good name for it.

I must confess that I don't know any Singapore poetry written in languages other than English. Alvin Pang and Goh Beng Choo perform a signal service for me and others like me by translating Yeng Pway Ngon, an important poet who writes in Chinese. Born in 1947, Yeng has written not only poetry, but also essays, fiction, plays and literary criticism, 24 volumes so far. He was the editor and publisher of two literary magazines, Teahouse in the 1980s and Encounter in the 1990s. He has had a long and distinguished literary career. In 2003 he received Singapore's Cultural Medallion for Literature. The pamphlet I bought from Books Actually last summer offers a selection of his early poems, published between 1967 and 1970. It is intended to be the first part of a series of translations of Yeng's poetry. Titled Poems 1 [Rebellion] , the work is very much that of a young man, as he agonizes over his place in the world and lashes out at careerism and consumerism. Steeped in the ...

After three weeks of fussing with WordPress, getting stuff together and asking people for permissions, today I launched Singapore Poetry , an e-gallery of all things poetic about Singapore, including poetry! Three people are following the website, after the first day. I am designing an email newsletter using MailChimp to reach out to my sign-up list. The inaugural page of SP consists of 12 posts: (1) Singapore Writers Festival (2) Featured Image: Jason Wee's "Vanishing Distance 5" (3) Featured Poem: Alvin Pang's "What It Means To Be Landless" (4) Tan Pin Pin's new documentary To Singapore, with Love , about political exiles (5) DesignTaxi (6) Joshua Ip's new book of poems Making Love with Scrabble Tiles (7) Loh Kah Seng's history book Squatters into Citizens (8) Singapore's Favorite Poem: a student nominates Cyril Wong's "A Kind of Hush" (9) new books from Math Paper Press (10) a newish on-line paper, The Independen...